


The Journal

by CorruptLimerence



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hand Touching, Slow Build, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, right before 2x06, takes place after 2x05, the journal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 14:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14381019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorruptLimerence/pseuds/CorruptLimerence
Summary: With Wyatt's wife back from the dead Lucy finds herself feeling a loss like no other. With her sister still erased, her mother a Rittenhouse big wig, and on the run in a small metal warren she feels that loss creeping into her. Where time travel and loss is concerned it's hard to find someone with similar life experience. Fortunately, Garcia Flynn is well versed in loss and knows far Lucy better than she knows herself be it from lifetimes of stolen conversations or the journal he knows by heart. Former enemies find comfort in pain.





	The Journal

**Author's Note:**

> This fic tasked place after 2x05 and right before 2x06. I wrote this last week before the promos for 2x06 came out and I'm shocked yet delighted to know that I am right about the exchanges that will go on.

“Are you feeding a team?” Jiya jutted her chin at the stack of Eggo waffles on the cheap Ikea plating currently balancing in Lucy’s hand. She glanced up to see Jiya giving her a good natured laugh. 

“Let me tell you, the food in the past sucks. And there is nothing quite like eating some good old processed american garbage when we get back.” Lucy smiled weakly. Jiya nodded. They hadn’t been on a mission in a week, but the convenience of microwave cuisine was a luxury Lucy could never quite give up. 

“It may not be the same but all those years studying in Uni I thought I would die if I didn’t get a pack of twenty chicken mcnuggets while doing physics.” She snorted. “The looks I would get in the drive through; the lady at the window was begging God that I had three kids in the back to eat them.”

“God what I wouldn’t give for McDonalds right now.” Rufus passed by with a slice a toast in his mouth. 

Jiya goofily grimaced and nodded. “I’m gonna get back to Rufus, run some diagnostics and see if we can get a fourth seat in the Lifeboat.”

Lucy gave an amenable nod and walked off to the common area with her stack of blueberry eggo waffles. She dumped the remainder of her armload onto the functional steel surfaces. What this bunker made up in protection it certainly lacked in a homey quality.

Jiya was with Rufus. Agent Christopher was with Connor Mason. And of course...Wyatt was with Jessica. 

Whoever this ragtag team claimed to be they all had their pairs with whom they fought for a purpose alongside. For a long time it had been her mother and Amy who were her home, then it was Rufus and Wyatt. And then, when it seemed like everything was falling to shit, she still had Wyatt.

You’ll never lose me. He had rushed over to embrace her and ascertain that he was a lifeline in a freefall. 

A familiar ache thumped between her ribs. 

I wish I was home.

Where was that now? Across all of time and space was there even a place that existed for her to feel that way? Was home a memory in her childhood now with Rittenhouse’s stain? Was it Amy, whose face got blurrier by the day? Was home back in her house where her and her fiance had once lived? Was it even in this little bunker? 

Even when her mother fought her over stanford and the teaching job, there was still someone fighting with her and for her. Now, well, there was this place, filled with desperate people doing desperate things. Thin hours of sleep and tired eyed survival peopled this place rather than government operatives, pilots, or heroes.

She shook her head. Head down, one foot in front of the other, that was how all progress was made, and if not, at the very least how survival was attained. 

With a waffle in her mouth she rummaged in her old papers and flicked on her laptop. The team relied on her to keep up to date on history, part of her job was to record changes made from one reality to another, The skeins of changes reverberating out of their actions were tedious at best to track. But someone had to do it, and memory was the weapon history. 

She chewed on her lip, the wriggling anxiety knifing her stomach as she recorded the assassination of JFK in austin rather than in Dallas. 

“Prior to the April Fifth 2018 flight to 1946 Massachusetts John F. Kennedy was-”

Lucy tried to write out the words to make sense of it. Her hand propped up her forehead, heavy from memory and tired of the present, and dreading the future. The more she looked at the pages of her notes, the more that dread crawled up her insides, puncturing her organs with claws of ice. 

She had to be strong, no one could afford to worry about her now. There was too much at stake. Billions of lives were depending on her job. The loneliness crept in on her, it was a gust of wind that isolated her in this bunker.

When she couldn’t be strong she wrote in the journal. A thoughtless stream of consciousness babbled up from a tight knot in her chest to pour onto the page. But everytime she did a bile like response worked itself up her spine. Her mother had given her the journal with a loving look in her eyes, a chicken soup remedy for the Preston soul. 

All of it was a lie.

Now the act of writing in this journal felt like a weakness. A weakness to her Rittenhouse mother’s influence. And a weakness to the inevitability of time, which they had supposedly mastered.

Lucy’s gaunt gaze turned to the embossed LP poking out from underneath her old thesis. If only she could look at it unlike a felon eyes an escape.

This is the last time, she lied to herself for the hundredth time.

She uncapped a pen like unsheathing a sword and began doing battle with the crisp pages. Time must have gone by, the next bite of eggo she took was cold. 

“Mind if I join you?” A gravelly voice rasped.

Lucy’s nerves shocked her system and she nearly flew ten feat in the air. 

Flynn stood over her, looking somewhere between a breathing Leyendecker effigy and an exhausted statue. Even his angular and pointed features seemed to have grown paler in the bunker.

“How long have you been there?” Lucy shot an accusing look at Flynn and slammed her hand over the words in the journal. 

“Not long,” His dark gaze flicked up and down her seated form with an inscrutable purpose. “Don’t worry, I won’t pry.”

He gestured to her notes and laptop, then to the seat across the already cramped table. 

“Please.” She said noncommittally and invited him to sit. Flynn pulled the chair and obliged.

His gaze stayed on her, the same look they shared in 1954 as he told her he was going to wipe her from existence. That look was intoxicated and laced with poison. A tenderness laced with a threat done so close to her it was hot breath on her neck. It was a concoction of too many emotions, but it was concerned all the same. Her lips parted at the look, her eyes darting to the muscle in his jaw. 

“You don’t have to hide it.” His voice was like a knife on stone, it sent shivers up her spine. The memory of the silent words they shared in salem came creeping up, when like a dog off his leash, permissibly beat those puritanical monsters. It had been satisfying, and even worse, little nerdy lucy liked it. 

“Hide what.”

“The journal.” 

Lucy glared defensively at him. “What, you spying on me now?”

A rueful smile plucked the deepening dimples on his cheeks, his knowing look peaked from beneath dark eyelashes. 

“Besides the fact that this bunker is only so big-no.” He said sardonically. “Lucy I know you are going to write it, whether you like it or not.” He worked his sleeve over his elbows. She was momentarily distracted by the latticework of white scar tissue sneaking up the tendons of his muscled forearms. 

A visceral bolt of annoyance at the thought prompted Lucy to cross her arms over her chest.

“Maybe it’s that I find it condescending that you pretend to know me so well when it’s all out of a book.” She answered swiftly.

“Which you gave me for safekeeping.” Flynn leaned forward, a soft look coloring his mouth. “You trusted me with that book.”

Lucy felt her stomach tie itself into warm knots. 

“Well, the sanity of future Lucy has yet to be seen.” She bit her lip, her gaze falling to Flynn’s folded fingers. She didn’t see the look Flynn gave her, one akin to ripped open stitches, and to a wound that Lucy didn’t know of. 

“I know what you’re going through.” Flynn ventured tentatively.

“HA.” Lucy scoffed, a lone hysterical chortle came from her mouth. “How can you possibly know?”

His rough fingertips thumbed the corner of the journal on the table. Flynn slipped it into his hands from the pile of papers and Lucy’s culpable hands. 

She had seen him holding the completed work so many times through hundreds of years, but seeing its unfinished and vulnerable contents held between his hands was far from regular. He toiled with a naked scrap of her in those pages. 

This was different. They were sitting together as uneasy allies, not knowing what to call each other? They were intimate in ways no other humans were and enemies in so many others. The hands that dealt violence touched the words; it made her breath catch in a way she didn’t know she was capable of. 

She froze, not understanding the comfort and the thrill it gave her. 

“This journal,” his gaze flew back up to her, “kept me going.”

Her eyebrows drew together.

Flynn pressed his lips together and held up the journal, absentmindedly turning the cover over and over in his hands. “My family was murdered by Rittenhouse, you thought I crazy for going at it alone against them. I knew that, but it didn’t lessen the panic.”

Lucy had heard this song and dance over hundreds of years. Except this time it agitated her own fears and dread, it cut stitches and plucked at her new wounds. Emotions she couldn’t feel empathy for before sang like a bell. She could not have fathomed emptiness in that time, not when they were tethered to tall dark and dangerous sitting opposite of her. 

“Knowing that in some other time you were as lonely, and as abandoned as I was gave me the will to survive.” He offered, his hand ghosted over hand, hovering, flickering, and nearly touching the top of hers. She held her breath.

Please god, do it or don’t. Just decide. 

He placed his hand next to hers but not quite touching her. A gust of disappointment knocked into her, which shocked her even more.

“I had lost every person I loved, I was ready to throw myself into whatever dangerous situation it took to right those wrongs. I knew no one cared what happened to me.” Flynn said, eyes looking at her with so much intent. “But in those nights beside or inside the mothership, the loneliness opened up in me and it screamed.”

His gaze flickers down to his fingers. 

A lump formed in her throat. A sensation, one that she was bound to feel eventually, filled her from crown to toe. She felt like she had known him for lifetimes all of a sudden.

“But having this journal, saved me in many ways.” the gruffness of his voice worked its way between her shoulder blades down to her hips. 

The world might have as well been just the two of them again, be it the 18th or 21st century.

“Thank you.” He said. 

“I didn’t do it for you.” Lucy whispered, trying to regain her footing, she swam in her emotions. 

“I owe you-”

“You don’t owe me anything, Flynn.” Lucy said firmly. “You saved my life multiple times in Salem. That’s enough.”

A warm and square hand covered hers, her eyes widening at the hum of electricity that passed between them. His head hung then his eyes snapped back up again to her, again with the eyes. 

“No it’s not.” 

“What’s your play here then?” She asked, trying to ignore the warmth flooding her face. 

“No play. I’m trying-” Flynn’s hand tensed, he sighed. “Fine, I don’t owe you anything. But I want to give you something.”

“And what’s that?” Lucy asked under her breath, more unsure of the moment than anything in the last week.

He took a breath.

“You deserve to be happy too.” He said.

She inhaled sharply.

“And you’re not alone.”

Pain cut quick to her chest. Lucy was not a fast cryer, but she turned her head to hide the tears that formed. 

“I’m not?” She challenged. 

A thumb stroked the tendons in her hand, an immediate soother.

“I don’t plan on leaving. What would you do without me?” A boyish and cheeky grin spread on his face. Mischief and chaos he might be, but it was a comfort. 

Lucy genuinely laughed for the first time in a week. Past Flynn and Future Lucy were right, they would be a great team. 

“I guess you’re right Mr. Flynn, I would die without you.” She laughed. The words were too specific, and seemed to choke him.

“We still have a lot to do here.” He said. The words felt like a promise, one she could actually count on. “I have a lot to make up for.”

Lucy curled her fingertips into his palm. He was lucky Lucy did not see his pulse jumping in his neck. 

“Do you regret what you’ve done?” She frowned, softness and a concern he didn’t deserve put a line between her brows. 

A thick silence followed.

“Your journal is already written, you could read it now if you wanted,” Lucy nodded, and Flynn continued, “But you needed to go through the struggle of writing it to have it be real.”

“Are you saying what you did was justified or that it was a struggle-”

“I’m not saying it was right, or good, God knows my wife was a catholic, I know what she and many other religions would think of me and what I’ve done.” He bowed his head. “But I dug my grave and wrote my sentence. But those deeds led me here, and for that I am grateful.”

His words skirted around admittance, he teased the line they dare not cross. 

“If I can lose and kill as much as I have and still be given the kindness of being here...you will survive and everyday it will get better without you knowing it.” He whispered it like it was language for only the two of them. “The loss you have felt, the betrayal by those closest to you, do not define you, Lucy. And they don’t mean that you don’t deserve to be happy.”

Lucy was dumbstruck and laid bare by the words. Their hands didn’t separate until this very second when her fingers went slack in his. He withdrew his fingers and got up from his chair.

Buffeted by a sudden cold, the vacuum of the moment filled with all that old dread and fear. She watched him turn to go.

“Wait.” She said. His tall and lean frame stiffened and paused. He looked at her from over his shoulder.

“Want an Eggo?” She said lamely. “I’ll give you a waffle and you can tell me all about Connecticut in 1934.” 

She was paid in a demure but bracketed smile and a chair being pulled up next to her.


End file.
